


stories in limbo

by caandleknight



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-06-15
Packaged: 2021-03-03 18:46:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24730273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/caandleknight/pseuds/caandleknight
Summary: Katniss dies in the first games, leaving everyone who loved her in pieces. The Capitol doesn’t stop taking though. Peeta wishes he never came home, and Gale is a dead man who never comes home again.“My father loved her,” the child giggles. She’s twelve and in the games.
Relationships: Gale Hawthorne/Madge Undersee, Katniss Everdeen/Gale Hawthorne, Katniss Everdeen/Peeta Mellark
Comments: 20
Kudos: 55





	stories in limbo

**Author's Note:**

> :)

_**limbo** _

_noun_

_a state of neglect or oblivion._

_**i.** _

Primrose is quiet in her scuffed, fluffy dress when he strolls up to her. Her soft hands grasp his as she stares at her toes.

The eyes that are on them are of a crowd, hollow, shallow, filled with unsaid condolences.

Gale drags her home by hand, ranting to Prim only lightly. “I wish they’d all stop that. She was reaped, she isn’t _dead_.” The sister with the blue-eyed gaze openly stares at him, squeezing his hand. “What?” He isn’t ready, and Prim can see that.

“Nothing, Gale.” They are at the Everdeen household. “You should get to work.”

His eyebrow raises. “I don’t start in the mines for another week.”

“Your other work,” the small child is tense, and far too wise. She watches him go as she clutches her tiny fingers into the back of her frail, blue dress, searching for a duck tail.

..

He does. Hunting is fun; Gale loves it, even if it’s quieter than normal.

..

Hazelle has always been a strong woman, but how do you tell your son the girl he’s in love with is dead? His frame makes it through the door, and she’s shocked more than she should be that he looks like his father.

How she wishes her husband was here to take this burden. Gale always responded better to his father, but right now and for always, his father is dead.

His father doesn’t understand what it’s like to have the love your life ripped away from you by forces you can’t control.

Hazelle does, and soon, Hazelle’s son will too.

He puts a loaf of bread on the table, dreading his next question. It’s the same one as every day since the games started. “Is she alive?” Hazelle collapses in on herself; he _has_ to know by now. Gale and Katniss were a known duo amongst the district.

The folk of twelve don’t know how to keep a secret, but of course they kept this one.

“No.”

When the word leaves Hazelle’s lips, she sees a tremble in Gale that’s akin to a radical heartbeat, ready to flatline.

“That’s not funny.” He just stares at her, unbreathing. He’s thumping away into a night of freezing rain, forgetting to shut the door behind him.

He’s gone, and he doesn’t come home until morning, but when he does, there’s a squirrel hanging from his belt and his knuckles are red, raw, and broken, and so are his eyes. Clothing sticks to him, muddy with sweat as he wipes at his eyes with his sleeves.

Punching trees through the tears should help, but it doesn’t.

Rory takes his hand and leads him out the door. Hazelle watches, knowing she’ll never see her son again.

..

Mrs. Everdeen tries her best, always has, and she made a promise. She has a beautiful blonde daughter who, more than an anything, needs a mother.

Stay in the real world. She can do this.

But, when her other beautiful daughter, takes a spear in the chest for a twelve-year-old girl from 11, everything slows down in her heart.

Everything blurs and now, there’s nothing.

When a tall boy is dragged in by his younger brother, Mrs. Everdeen doesn’t feel a thing, numbly cleaning the broken, blistered hands, even when he starts to question her. Shutting down and staring into the wall, she doesn’t notice the boy who was in love with her daughter as he screams his sins and her sins and their sins in her face.

Where is the real world?

..

Haymitch Abernathy truly thought this was his year. He’d have a _victor_ and she’d be a golden one. He thought she’d win.

He watches as the hovercraft picks up Katniss Everdeen, with the little girl of 11 sprawled in her lap, strangled to death. He thought he’d have a victor this year.

(He did, and he was golden-haired.)

When her casket pulls into the district, it’s the same eery silence as every year before, hollow with flowers. When Peeta Mellark does, there’s cheering and screaming from all but one large family. There’s an empty blonde mother, a strong dark-haired one, and a batch of seam children: they’re all circled around a tall, broken boy in mining overalls. The boy holds a golden Primrose on his shoulders, who shines brighter than any pin ever could, even through her tears.

( _“I volunteer,”_ Katniss Everdeen had screamed for the golden, golden girl.)

The child stared at the blond victor, digging her fingers into a grey-eyed boy’s hair. The victor is supposed to be her sister. (The body in the casket is supposed to be Primrose.)

The salty tears crippling down her rounded, innocent cheeks blame Peeta Mellark for surviving.

The Seam boy stares Haymitch dead in the eyes, blaming and challenging and he’s just like him. _She_ was supposed to come home. The child on his shoulders is so, so shattered. Haymitch’s fingers itch, begging for a drink.

Haymitch always thought having a victor would be _better_ , but it’s not. Now, he has to look someone in the eye and say, “your kid wasn’t as good as the other, my bad.”

He’s never had that.

..

Rory Hawthorne doesn’t know what to do. He’s twelve, not stupid, and when his brother stops coming home, he notices.

Of course, his body walks through the rickety doorframe everyday, dusty and cracked in a frayed uniform that belonged to their father and before that, no one knows, because all the names are lost in the sea of bones and every day Gale adds one of his to the mix.

Gale’s face is scruffy with a shadow of hair and he appears to be a man. Except, he’s empty. All “please” and “thank you” and “huh?” because he’s _never_ here, _never_ listening.

His soul hasn’t walked through the door in months, and Rory doesn’t want to know where Gale left it. All his brother’s anger had been simmering for years.

Dad died, then Katniss, and now Rory’s biggest brother is livid.

He keeps them fed, does his dues and that’s it. Stories cease to be and snare lessons drop off the face of the earth.

Gale works and comes home, cold with coal.

Rory thinks as he tucks a four-year-old Posy into his shoulder: Gale is a ghost, only anchored by his obligations.

..

Haymitch thought after the burial, he’d never think of Katniss Everdeen.

He can’t remember half of his tributes, so she’d be the same, but it’s been years since he’s put faith into a tribute, decades even and so this one stings. (Only a little.) Or burns, maybe it rips at his scalp and maybe, he just wants to scratch away the empty promises.

He never thought he’d think of her again.

Turns out, the pendulum on his grandfather clock sways like her braid and he needs a fucking _drink_.

When he stumbles into the Hob, half-destroyed, as always, he sees a boy whose shoulders rumble and thunder, glaring at Haymitch with storm-cloud eyes. Familiar eyes.

Ripper supplies Haymitch two bottles of white liquor over the grey countertops without question. The first thing he does is waltz over the Sae’s stall, false proxy in his step. It’s grey as the old woman wipes her table down.

Everything here is.

Liquor sloshes in the glass bottle as it falls into the boy’s lap. They drink. Haymitch learns the boy’s name is Gale Hawthorne. Haymitch learns that Gale Hawthorne loved the dead tribute, but not from a confession of words. Not even Haymitch Abernathy’s constant haze of ethanol can censor the clarity of what that girl was to this boy.

Haymitch learns so much, and he forgets it all in the morning (or he tries to.)

..

Madge Undersee is returning a book, thick with crumpled pages, to the districts bare libraries when she runs into him.

He barely acknowledges her, doesn’t even glare and that’s how she knows he’s broken. When Gale Hawthorne lets go of his animosities, he’s so far gone he isn’t even him anymore.

Madge wears nice clothing, frilly around the hems and new this year. It’s a dress that would’ve made him sneer a couple months ago. Gale wears the same shirt: blue turned grey, and it has a couple holes. He’s worn it for years but it finally fits him.

Madge tries not to notice.

They chat a little and never about _her_. The book is tucked to her chest when he tries to kiss her. Gale has alcohol on his breath and so Madge slaps him across the face. His eyes give her an empty look, even as her palm stings and his cheek glows a warming pink.

“Why don’t you hate me?” She exclaims in his face. His eyes waver, lips tightening.

Madge catches him when he falls to his knees, because she’s nice like that. Gale was Katniss’ more-than-but-not-best-friend, and Madge just wants a boy to fall in love with her the way he did with Katniss.

(Or she wants him to. It’s simple really, and pathetic.)

..

When Katniss Everdeen died, the district fell apart at the seams. She inspired too many people.

It made Peeta coming home seem disappointing, but nothing makes his stomach drop more than seeing the hollow little sister who believes her life was Katniss Everdeen’s death sentence and a shell of a mother who was never there to begin with.

It’s too much, sometimes, so he walks, and he wanders and he walks.

The worst is the boy, because Peeta _knew_ Gale, traded with him even. They talked, even if most of their conversations were filled with empty statements and underlying competition. Peeta knew Gale, and now he can’t seem to tell the difference between the miner and a lost child.

So Peeta walks: his house is too quiet, too big, but in the district, noise is the only constant, until a reaping anyway.

The slagheap is a bad place to drink and a worse place to take a walk, but here they both are, Peeta Mellark and Gale Hawthorne, chasing a dead girl.

Gale looks at him from his seat in patchy grass with eyes of death as he whispers, “I should’ve volunteered.” The night is dark and cold, and neither of them should be here. Curfew is not kind. Peeta would escape punishment. Gale Hawthorne would not, not under the new head peacekeeper.

“I could’ve saved her if I volunteered,” he wallows into his last third of the large bottle. The clear liquid swirls soundly with the rhythmic sway of his wrist.

“Why didn’t I volunteer?” Gale is a man of broken voices and broken records because he just circles around himself. Where is she? It’s not real. It can’t be. Where is she? It’s not real. It can’t be.

Again. Again. _Again._

Peeta Mellark wishes he never came home as he throws Gale’s arm over his shoulder. Her death destroyed the lives of a family, and her death shook the district more than any tribute had in years.

His life is a painful reminder of it. He starts to drag the Hawthorne he used to envy home.

Gale Hawthorne, the good, the oh-so-handsome. What a _protector_. At first, Peeta thought it was ridiculous that Katniss fell into his trap too, following Gale Hawthorne around like every other girl. A couple of trades and loaves later, he realized Gale fell into hers—Peeta couldn’t judge. It’s a well placed trap—and never escaped.

Judging by how heavy the boy in Peeta’s arms is, he never will.

“I’m _fine_ ,” Gale slurs, a little bit drunk and a lot depressed. His clothes stink of coal, sweat and the ever present smell of drunken trees. “Why would I want help from you...anyway?” Peeta thinks he was going for intimidating, but the blond only sighs, hiking him up as Gale slips minusculy from his grasp.

They’re halfway to Gale’s house and Peeta thinks to thank his father for making him carry all that flour for so many years. Gale is a big guy, at least a couple inches taller than Peeta, and he’s dead weight on Peeta’s shoulders.

“I could’ve saved her if it was me.” Gale whispers—(“ _you weren’t good enough, Peeta,_ ” is what he’s saying.)—faltering every couple steps on the cobble like a truly shattered record. “I should’ve saved her.” They approach the Hawthorne’s door—(“ _neither was I,_ ” he continues.)—and Peeta begins to knock lightly.

Primrose Everdeen opens the door to Peeta’s surprise. She is quickly replaced by a woman who shoos the child away.

With disappointed eyes, she watches her son, but as he steps away from Peeta, stumbling, she catches him. Hazelle Hawthorne nods to Peeta in thanks and the door closes. Snow begins to trickle down from the sky and the cold catches up to him all at once. It prickles and his prosthetic leg aches.

Peeta walks away, and walks, and wanders, and walks.

..

Madge knows she should’ve stopped watching him years ago, after the first time he sneered at her pink, little dress.

She definitely knows she never should’ve touched him. But he’s broken, and he still brings the strawberries and Katniss is dead. Madge must have a soft spot for rebellious, shattered boys.

She’s an easy way for him to forget about her, and Madge knows that.

Her golden-haired and blue-eyed appearance is juxtaposed to the beautiful, tiny, stormy-eyed girl Gale used to call Catnip. She pulls him inside and Gale wastes no time.

Strawberries sit on the countertop as he pulls at her hair and rips her apart only to stitch her back together with little kisses.

(They are volatile and aggressive but honestly, the teeth marks under her breasts, and fingerprints on her thighs barely hurt compared to when he says, “ _Katniss_ ,” instead.)

Madge knows she should’ve stopped watching him when Katniss became the centre of his world but here she is, orbiting a dead girl.

..

Vick Hawthorne misses his brother, especially when he starts coming home stinking with Primrose’s magic injury cleaner. (“ _So it doesn’t get infected,_ ” the blonde whispered when wrapping his thumb.)

Gale is so angry all the time, not at them, never at them. Never has he lashed out at his family. Gale’s mad at the Capitol and it scares Vick. The way it simmers beneath his brows and clenches in his fingers, like Katniss was the only thing keeping him from the ashes.

Katniss Everdeen was magic in ways little Vick cannot understand.

Vick misses her too, and no matter what Rory says, Vick did _not_ think she was pretty, and he did _not_ have a crush on her. (“Oh sorry Vicky, I forgot that was _Gale_ ,” the boys used to laugh.

They don’t laugh anymore.)

Vick Hawthorne is eight years old and isn’t stupid either: he understands that she’s dead, and he understands his brother will never come home.

_“He’s a ghost_ ,” Rory had said, and Vick doesn’t want to believe it.

“Gale?” Vick asks his brother from the floor. He just stares at Vick with empty eyes, stretching his raw fingers mechanically: they are calloused and cracked from clutching a pickaxe all day.

“Hmm?” He murmurs.

_Can we have a bedtime story?_ (But Vick looks to Rory and remembers all the times Gale said no. Vick hates when his brother says, “maybe next time, okay?”)

“Nothing.” Gale didn’t hear him either way. He just sits on the couch, flexing his fingers.

..

Darius stares at the echoes of a boy he used to know much better.

Hawthorne’s shoulders are hard and he still trades, but there’s an empty spot next to him, always empty nowadays. The ginger’s fingers itch for something that isn’t there, for hair he can’t fiddle.

Mandatory viewings begin, and Darius has to watch too.

His heart flies to his throat when they review last years games, revving up the district (oh _so_ exciting) for the third quarter quell. There she is and the ginger’s first thoughts fly to a boy who hates him for being the one to drag him away from his last minutes with Katniss.

No one is surprised when Hawthorne assaults a peacekeeper, tackling Romulus Thread to the ground.

(“I should’ve saved her.”)

..

Madge doesn’t understand herself. He’s a prick and he calls her by the wrong name, but hey, here’s some morphine, please be okay.

Please.

..

Primrose needs her mother. Gale is whipped to oblivion on the Hawthorne’s table, cold and barely breathing and—Mom. _Please_.

She’d been sitting in the back room, catatonic and empty for almost a year now, and Gale is _dying_.

This must be what Katniss went through.

Prim tingles as resentment continues to climb through her bones. His blood runs down the table as he groans and tenses, frantically moving, pushing himself on his elbows and arching his shoulders, desperate for _any_ form of relief. She injects him with the morphine and cries into her hands. Tears leak down her elbows, dripping and soaking into her scratchy socks. He finally settles, collapsed face first into the blood-stained, wooden table.

Wiping away her pain, she makes a few stitches. He’ll die if she doesn’t, and Primrose does each stitch alone, steady hands and crackled breaths.

“ _Mom_!”

Only the cat answers, and Rory; he snatches her hand, but more for himself. She can tell, but she doesn’t care. Primrose squeezes his fingers in hers when she hears Gale mumble, “ _Catnip_ ,” through a haze of blood and opiates.

The dam breaks and her tears start running. This time, they absorb into Rory threadbare shirt, because he’s hugging her and Prim doesn’t know how it happened.

“ _Hey, Catnip._ ” Primrose doesn’t have the heart to tell Gale no one is there.

..

Peeta Mellark sits in his huge house, swirling tea that smells of mint and the woods. Paints reside at his elbow height on a tray as he flicks a sunset onto a canvas, an orange little sunset.

It’s his favourite colour and passively, he wonders what Katniss’ was. She seemed like a blue kind of girl.

He never really had the chance to know her, now did he?

His eyes wander to his reference out the window and land upon Haymitch, gritty in fancy clothes. Unbuttoned dress shirt and muddy pants are a dichotomy compared to the boy across from him. Gale is in threadbare clothes, doing his best to look respectable. He stands as straight as he can against his scabbing back.

The red eyes and unkempt hair give him away though, oh and the scars do too.

Haymitch hands a bottle filled with liquor and death to a flinching Gale Hawthorne, who buries it in what Peeta recognizes to be his game bag with shame.

Peeta watches, ignoring that the sun has cracked passed the horizon and is no longer a viable reference for his painting. Gale takes the liquor and doesn’t think twice.

Peeta Mellark wishes he never came home.

..

He’s tired.

Gale wanders into the mines, shuttering his breath on the dirty air. The darkness of this graveyard absorbs his eyes as he slowly adjusts. Alone, he walks, bucket clanking his knee.

Men of all ages clamber around him, broken, talking in hushed tones and anxiety.

This always happens in the wake of a reaping. Silence ticks by second after second as coal laced fingernails clench around pickaxe handles. They all think of their children, wives, girlfriends, siblings as they beat the point into coal and rock.

It’s almost been a year and Gale still sees her smiles and hears her laughs.

Through his shift, the lovely twelve hours, Gale doesn’t speak once. He hacks away at the rocks and has a staring contest with the canary.

(Please, just die, feather to the ground, so Gale can ache to his knees. Please, stop breathing so he can too.)

Gale ignores the choking cough of his coworker, who Prim has confirmed has a lung disease, but the elderly man still purchases smokes from the Hob, and he still works in the mines.

Gale used to question people like that.

They’re the ones struggling to make ends meet, yet they still buy their smokes, or gamble half their paycheques. Haymitch holding a bottle flashes in his head as Gale absorbs into the rhythm of the coal miner, desperate to think of anything but braids and arrows, and desperate to avoid his shame.

Gale doesn’t question people like that, not anymore.

A stupid boy catches his pick on his shin. He’s new, freshly eighteen but the curdling screeches that leave him remind Gale of Vick. Gale ignores him, hacking at the stone.

He’s so used to pain it doesn’t even faze him.

The older gentleman with the cough sighs out into the dark dust and sets down his axe, walking his way to the scrawny boy. He throws an arm over his old mining shoulder, mumbling in a sickly rasp, “lets getter to the Everdeen’s.”

Gale’s pickaxe slips from his grasp and— _braids_.

..

Maybe the odds are in their favour, Rory thinks as the quell is announced.

“As a reminder that the twelve districts have no power over the Capitol, on this, the third quarter quell games, the male and female tributes are to be reaped from a pool of children, all aged twelve.”

Is he a horrible person for letting out a sigh of relief before grabbing Prim’s hand? Does this family belong in hell for almost _celebrating_?

Even Gale, he throws his arms around Rory and picks him up, almost _laughing_.

..

Madge may be orbiting a dead girl but she still cares about Gale.

They lie next to each other, breathing heavily. He rolls over, facing the wall, like he always does. His back is a torn, bronze canvas: beauty blended with pain.

The marks are a brand: “ _Katniss Everdeen was here_ ,” they say, carved into his shoulder blades and spine with talons of a whip.

“You have to quit drinking.” He looks at her, shocked. Rolling out of bed, he throws his shirt over his shoulders. He sneers at her, leaving an imprint in her mattress, but he _sneers_.

She smiles once he’s out the door.

..

Gale Hawthorne hates the forest.

It’s quiet and full of trees and all he can do is think and scream. He just wants to drown it out. Gale thought the drinking was fine. His family is _fed_ : the bottle is waiting and Gale knows it. But sometimes, he sees her dancing in the woods just barely in the corner of his eye.

“ _You have to quit drinking_ ,” but it’s Katniss who says it in his ear.

Gale thinks he has forgotten her voice, and he chokes on the revelation. (It kind of sounds like Madge, in a horribly twisted way.)

He used to think he loved the woods. It wasn’t the woods he loved.

..

Haymitch Abernathy has a bottle ready, like he has for years, waiting on his porch, and when the boy never comes, he drinks it himself. Haymitch has a reaping to attend.

Quitting is not in his cards, not today.

..

Madge isn’t surprised when he’s at her door with a basket of strawberries, and she hates herself for not (never) turning him away.

She doesn’t taste any alcohol on Gale’s lips when he kisses her and afterwards, they face one another. They talk, sprawled amongst the sheets.

“All she ever did was laugh at me, y’know? Or shut me down when I’d got idealistic or—“ The more he talked, the thicker his voice became.

Madge brushes the hair from his face softly as his breath falters. “But she laughed, and we both know she never did that.”

He kisses her slowly, calling her Madge and maybe the dead girl smiles.

**_ii._ **

Posy Hawthorne is ten now, and Katniss Everdeen is barely a memory to her.

The way her brother lights up when he speaks of her makes her want to dance. Katniss has her own little square and it bothers little Pose, just a bit, because he’s supposed to be _her_ big brother. Then, Posy sees how much he cares for her, and she’s over it pretty quickly.

She barely remembers Katniss, but oddly, she remembers loving Katniss.

It’s childish, she knows, but when Gale comes home with Madge only six years after Katniss dies, Posy acts haughty, sticking up her nose. He has only waited six years!

“You’re just like your brother,” Madge coddles, ruffing Posy’s hair. (That can’t be right: all she’s done is be _rude_ to her.)

The blonde is so pretty and so kindly snarky, but what about _Katniss_? Primrose loved her sister too, but she seems okay with Madge. Gale loves Katniss, and Gale loves Madge but Posy Hawthorne is now eleven and it’s still too hard to understand.

..

Effie Trinket used to see the boy far too often and he makes it far too hard not to care.

“No, I haven’t seen Haymitch. No. I still haven’t.” It was like that for three years.

Effie was glad to see him go and never come back, but he does come back. “Are you hiring? My mother could use a job.”

..

Peeta Mellark hires Hazelle Hawthorne because he wishes he never came home. He did though, and he has to make the most of it. He comes home from his walks to a freshly cleaned house and a pantry restocked with flour and sugar.

He pretends not to notice when some of it is missing: Haymitch pretends too.

..

Posy Hawthorne is twelve and she’s dancing at her brother’s wedding.

Madge Hawthorne is a good name, Posy supposes, pursing her lips as her aged dress frills lightly around her tiny knees. She dances with no one and everyone because she is a child and doesn’t care for the difference.

Her dress is blue and clinches around her waist. It’s an old dress, marked with “ _K.E._ ” on the seams.

Gale grabs her hands a twirls his little sister into his arms, where she rests comfortably beneath his shoulders. Posy is tall for her age, like the rest of the Hawthornes. She steps onto both of his feet, and stays there, laughing because he keeps moving anyway.

“Am I taller than Catnip was?”

Posy is twelve and she never really knew Katniss Everdeen, but all she sees when she looks at her oldest of older brothers is an empty space to his right. The ghost of the girl has never left his eyes, even if he just married the beautiful Madge, even if he loves Madge. There is an empty space to his right, but a blonde, snarky girl on his left.

“No, Pose, not yet,” and he spins her.

..

Effie Trinket loves the eccentrics and hates how much joy she has to thrust into the reapings, but she loves her life, knowing it’s better than all of theirs.

She knows, but she lives comfortably, and—

It’s the 81st annual Hunger Games and she reads, “ _Posy Hawthorne_.” Because what are the odds?

She nearly chokes on her accent.

..

Posy Hawthorne is twelve and she thinks she gets it.

When she dies, she wants them all to be okay, to move on. Six years seems like a long time to be stuck, Posy realizes. It’s half her life. She is twelve, not stupid, but now she’s crying: crippling tears flow down rounded cheeks that have yet to harden (because she’s _twelve_ ). Her sleeves can only absorb so many.

(She’ll never be taller than Catnip.)

..

Hazelle Hawthorne knew her luck would run out eventually.

She had four children and they all lived passed five in a district where it’s rare to survive birth, but after her husband and after Katniss she thought maybe it’d all work out.

Hazelle hugs her child to her chest, and cries because she isn’t coming home.

..

Rory is so much older than he should be.

From the packed square, he watched his little sister freeze to death, because no one sponsored her. He’s the only one who watches. His mother scratches at scabbed hands. Prim hugs into Rory’s shoulder. Gale is gone again and Madge is holding his hand desperately, pleadingly.

(Vick nearly pukes, kicking stones at his feet: he’s sixteen, and he should’ve volunteered but he froze, but not quite like his sister.)

Rory is empty, and Prim’s shaking gaze is scanning him. “ _I understand_ ,” her eyes murmur.

Gale says, “huh?” when they get home and they’re back where they started.

Madge stands beside Primrose, both of them golden-haired in the room full of ravens. Vick sobs, and Gale stares and Rory is ready for murder. Hazelle shakes and Madge just stands there, unaware of what to do, wondering if she’s a curse.

..

Haymitch knows it’s his fault.

The Capitol doesn’t appreciate charity, and apparently, helping a man acquire an alcohol addiction counts.

The Capitol does appreciate when a victor cares about someone though, because then, they can ruin your life.

“ _Posy Hawthorne_.” Effie breathed, folding her painted fingers into the paper.

Haymitch didn’t mean to curse out Snow at last week’s gala. Please, be a dream: he didn’t mean to.

_**iii.** _

Gale Hawthorne has a child, and god, he’s never thought of running away more than in this moment. Little Katniss just turned twelve. The reaping is in a week.

Leaning over his tiny daughter, he pushes her dark hair from her face while she sleeps, soundly. His child doesn’t understand this yet.

It’s not quite fair.

He’s so scared. Primrose had a Katniss. Posy didn’t have one (hers didn’t volunteer) and Katniss _is_ her Katniss.

She has blue eyes though, not grey: her hair is braided down her back, and she can’t shoot a bow for shit, but the way she manipulates snares makes him proud every day. What if she’s reaped? It’s one slip they say, and it’s never stopped Effie before.

The Capitol has a flare for the dramatic.

Madge wraps her arms around his back as he combs through his daughter’s hair. “She’ll be okay.” Except she’s scared too.

He turns to his wife, who he loves. And he remembers how he hated her privilege. She had five slips when Katniss had twenty but now, as their tiny Katniss prepares for her reaping, he’s so incredibly thankful she only has one.

..

Of course she gets reaped.

And Haymitch, well into his seventies gives Gale an empty stare. “She’s not coming home,” the elderly man whispers.

“They took Posy. Isn’t that enough?” Gale takes the bottle from Haymitch, the charity, because he has nothing more to lose.

Haymitch never told him what he did to Posy, and never will.

“They like the drama. Your kid was perfect for that, don’t you know?”

..

Peeta Mellark has dulled through the tears too. Not a single victor in twenty-two years. All the kids start to blur together, regardless of Peeta’s efforts.

He can’t take risks like drinking to lose all inhibitions: he has a brother and a father left. He can’t curse out Snow like Haymitch did.

Peeta Mellark hasn’t had a victor, but he makes a promise, “she’ll come home, I swear.”

..

Caesar Flickerman is good at his job.

“Katniss Hawthorne, such a sweetie, but tell me, your name’s so familiar. How do I know it?” Her dress is red, and Cinna did too good of a job.

Her dress is a mockingjay, just waiting to spin.

“Because I’m awesome.” She’s twelve and charming, has the arrogance of her father. The audience laughs, fanning themselves. Her hair curls like her mother’s, but she smiles like a dead girl she doesn’t know.

“No, no. Have you heard of Katniss Everdeen?” Caesar says. A hush falls over the audience. There has been over two thousand tributes, but Panem still remembers the girl on fire.

“Oh! Yes, my father _loved_ her!” She’s innocent, and so very perfect at drama. A tragedy is born, filtered in Capitol and games.

“My auntie was in the games too. Her name was Posy.” Sobs fall from the lips of shallow Capitolites. They remember her less so, but the game-makers are magic and seamlessly, pictures of an auntie Katniss never saw the face of flash on the screens.

She speaks like they aren’t dead.

To her, they were just stories and soon, she’ll be one too, one older brothers tell to their siblings as they starve.

..

Rory Hawthorne hasn’t seen his brother, even though he’s gone to work with him every day for sixteen years. Him and Vick chat solemnly, about everything and nothing because they’re brothers.

The Capitol interviewed Gale when the kids made it into the top eight, because “it’s truly a tragedy.” Your lover (as the Capitol puts it: what a _scandal_ ). Your sister. Your daughter. Gale gave broken answers and at work, Rory catches him staring at the canary.

Katniss Hawthorne makes it to the top five, but she gives her life to save her district partner, getting struck in the chest with a spear.

The fourteen-year-old Seam boy dies anyway.

Rory Hawthorne is glad he hasn’t truly seen his brother in years, because the real Gale is an angry man and he’d get himself killed.

District 8 rebels and everything starts collapsing as tales run rampant. The men of the mines chatter and gossip, talking of Coriolanus Snow.

..

No one is surprised when the mines collapse, not even Primrose Everdeen, who has waited every day for her husband to come home.

There was no warning.

The alarms shrilled through the air. Her hands are covered in alcohol and blood when they start to drag in the first of the victims.

A man dies, another lives, the final loses his leg.

When it starts to slow down, Prim wipes her hands to clean her bloody ledger. It’s too late when she gets there. Darius shakes his head at her as she asks.

“All three?”

“All three.” Her braid climbs over her shoulder and she thinks of Rory, and Rory and her father, and then Rory.

The mines exploded, taking the rest of the Hawthorne men. The first of them was taken years ago.

It’s tradition, by now.

..

Vick is cold. Dust trickles from the cavern rocks onto the corpse of the fourth and final member of their squad. Thom’s blood leaks from his overalls, blackened by the dusty, thick air.

A mine collapse: he hasn’t heard one in over two decades and even then, he was barely four. They’re going to die here.

Group 6 will suffocate if they don’t get crushed first.

They should be more panicked than they are, but Gale just leans his helmet-clad head against the rocks. The little clank echoes in the small cave as he relaxes his aging shoulders.

Rory glares at him, because he has so much to lose. “I’m sorry, Prim.” He murmurs, smacking his pick against the cold earth beneath them monotonously. Rocks creak and cry as they push against one another, waiting to cave in on them.

Vick is tired, but he’s brave.

He picks up the (alive, and well) canary into his coal-dusted fingers, petting the feathers. His little sister dances through his mind for the first time in ten years.

The way she’d grasp his once smaller, coal free hands and pull him in to play and how she’d shrill in joyful laughs whenever he would lisp from talking too quickly.

(The Hawthorne’s have a volunteering problem. They never do it when they should. Vick was old enough to protect her, wasn’t he?)

His niece arrives knocking on the doors of his mind, and she was just like Posy. Small and beautiful, holding their world together. Ignoring Rory’s irritating clanks, Vick pets the birdie between his fingers.

Dead people never leave you alone.

Katniss Everdeen, eternally sixteen, whispers in his ear and his father rests a hand on his shoulder, but when Vick looks at the crackled hand wrapping into the crumpled collar of his shirt, it’s not his father.

Gale stands behind him, temples greyed and stained with wrinkles that make him look fifty instead of forty.

Vick misses his brother, hating that he was a chore on him for so many years. He hates that Gale had to feed three children when he was only a boy, clad in a jacket five sizes too big. Gale didn’t know what he was doing, but little Posy still squeaked when he came home, (like a daughter with a father.) Rory still tackled him with smiles.

Vick asked for bedtime stories until Katniss Everdeen died; Vick tries to remember her, he does, but sometimes she slips his mind like she was never even there.

It’s worse with his father. The man never slips Vick’s mind. He’s never there to begin with: he imagines his father’s face and just sees Gale.

Then, suffocating space crackles, dust trickling from indents in the collapsed shaft. Rory’s rhythm halts for a moment as he jolts to look at where the dust came from. They’re scared but they’re calm: they’ve been scared all their lives.

(He thinks of his sister, and the stupid, stupid games.)

“Gale?” Dust trickles from the roof as Vick runs his thumb over the canary’s little feathers.

(He thinks of his niece, and her blue, blue eyes.)

His brother looks him straight in the eyes, with complete understanding and awareness.

(He thinks of the girl his brother was so, so in love with.)

“Can we have a story?”

..

Madge is alone. A wife, who no longer speaks to her husband, just trying to move on in her own little world. A best friend died, a sister-in-law froze. Her daughter is gone too. You call a parentless child an orphan, but is there a word for a childless parent?

Sometimes, you can’t come back from things.

But even then—estranged as she may be with the man who took too many punches, and now he can’t laugh right—when she hears the news that three people she knows (loves) were crushed to death, her knees go weak.

She visits Hazelle, who hasn’t spoken to her since the reaping and Primrose is already there.

They all burn to death under Capitol bombs.

..

Peeta can’t believe, out of all them, he’s the one who survived. He was never a fighter, but the odds don’t care who you are.

So he walks, and he wanders, but then he rebuilds.

..

It’s over.

Haymitch knows it, but the nightmares never go. Somehow, his liver never catches up to him. It was probably Capitol medicine, or something. They had the weirdest substances. Effie is there to wake him up and never lets him drink.

Good old Effie, eighty and still colourful. She wears pink hats and paints butterflies onto her eyelids, and she’s his best friend.

They wander into the Hob to a soup stall, now lacking Greasy Sae. Old age got her, and she never got to see _this_.

The hustle and bustle of _happy._

The counter is empty, and even though it was decades ago, Haymitch can still see two Seam children, drowning in soup and skinning rabbits through their laughter.

(But that’s bullshit he knows; there was never laughter, not _real_ laughter, the kind where your belly aches and your mouth falls open because worrying wasn’t worth your time.

No one ever laughed back then, except maybe Snow.)

Were their deaths worth this?

Thousands of children died in those games. Three of them, Gale Hawthorne loved with his whole heart. Three times that heart was ripped from his body, shredded, stomped on and then shoved down his throat.

Haymitch’s favourite drinking buddy is dead, and so is the one tribute he was so sure would win. Was it worth it? His old bones can’t decide.

Haymitch sits next to Effie, and he sees children screaming in glee as they play tag. He breathes in the fresh air of the District.

It’s not worth it to him, but to them: the children running, climbing the fences, tossing rocks, and sword fighting with absolute joy. They are unaware of the kids who slaughtered each other with blades only years ago.

Haymitch decides that it will be worth it, eventually, to those who knew nothing of the Hunger Games.

But he’ll always remember how he killed little Posy because he opened his mouth when he wasn’t supposed to, and he’ll remember Maysilee Donner, and how he let her die at his knees.

He’ll remember how Katniss Everdeen slammed a knife between his fingers and sparked passion into him, regardless of her cold temperament and his detached attitude.

He’ll remember Hawthorne’s blue, blue eyed little girl, who spun in her mockingjay dress. He’ll remember Hazelle Hawthorne and how she cleaned his house thoroughly, expecting no thanks.

He will remember them all, and he will never try to forget them, not anymore.

Effie’s spotty, wrinkled fingers thread into his. He’s spent decades next to her and even if her most defining quality has always been ignorance, she never misses anything with him. She gives his hand a squeeze, and he decides: one day, it will be worth it to everyone else.

It’ll be one hell of a story.

.

**Author's Note:**

> Oof.


End file.
